My name is Audrey Mantooth. I am a printmaker and mixed media artist currently located in Thornton, Colorado and working out of Red Delicious Press in Aurora.
Throughout my artistic career I have focused my work on the beauty of nature and the need for environmental conservation. Many of my most recent prints portray the devastating impacts of speciesism and urbanization on our natural ecosystems. Through an ongoing series of large-scale woodblock prints, with “The Culling” being the third in the series, I focus on gray wolves and their current treatment and endangered and threatened statuses in the lower 48, particularly the volatile relationship they unfortunately share with humans.
Through my prints, I illustrate the animals' perspectives, showing the harsh reality of their lives in the face of brutal human intolerance; pushing the viewer to see the humanity in beast and the beast in humanity. This print focuses on the lengths mankind will go to remove beings we were supposed to share this world with but have left no place for. It depicts the looming threat of eradication as the human animals invade, while the fear and anguish of the nonhuman animals is plainly seen and felt, knowing there is no way out.
This is a grim reality for so many species and often arises as a result of fear and a feeling of human superiority; feelings that have led us to destroy beautiful creatures and a world of natural checks and balances. Now we hold onto deep rooted hatreds, misguided beliefs, and perhaps unsurprisingly, an unwillingness to adopt nonviolent alternatives to mitigate conflict.
It is clear that speciesism has led to significant harm and unsustainable living with our natural surroundings. My hope is that this body of work can build on the efforts of so many other advocates, to establish empathy and the right to a quality life for non-human animals and to respect their natural environments. Once we agree that wolves, and nature as a whole, have the right to exist without the terror inflicted by humans’ need to control, I believe finding workable solutions for co-existence will become a uniting endeavor for all, instead of a dividing one.